18
Front Man
Recently
Sandpoint, Idaho
At 11:14 A.M., the doomed Deane Party departs LAX on the first leg of its epic journey, taking up an entire first-class row on the Virgin Airlines direct flight to Seattle. In 2A, Michael Deane stares out his window and fantasizes this actress looking exactly as she did fifty years ago （and himself, too）， imagines her forgiving him instantly （Water under the bridge, darling）。 In 2B, Claire Silver glances up occasionally from the excised opening chapter of Michael Deane’s memoir in whispered awe （No way . . . Richard Burton’s kid?）。 The story is so matter-of-factly disturbing that it should instantly seal her decision to take the cult museum job, but her repulsion gives way to compulsion, then curiosity, and she flips the typewritten pages faster and faster, oblivious to the fact that Shane Wheeler is casually tossing unsubtle negotiating gambits across the aisle from 2C （I don’t know; maybe I should shop Donner! around . . .）。 Seeing Claire immersed in whatever document Michael Deane gave her, Shane begins to worry that it’s another script, perhaps one even more outlandish than his Donner! pitch, and quickly abandons his coy negotiating tactics. He turns away, to old Pasquale Tursi in 2D, makes polite conversation （“è sposato?” Are you married? “Sì, ma mia moglie è morta.” Yes, but my wife is dead. “Ah. Mi dispiace. Figli?” I’m sorry. Any children? “Sì, tre figli e sei nipoti.” Three children, six grandchildren）。 Talking about his family makes Pasquale feel embarrassed about the silly, old-man sentimentality of this late-life indulgence: acting like a lovesick boy off chasing some woman he knew for all of three days. Such folly.
But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon—but true quests aren’t measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant—sail for Asia and stumble on America—and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.
In the Emerald City the tragic Deane Party changes planes, Shane ever so casually mentioning that the ground they’ve covered so far in just over two hours would’ve taken William Eddy months to travel.
“And we haven’t even had to eat anyone,” Michael Deane says, and then adds, more ominously than he intends, “yet.”
For the final leg they pack into a commuter prop-job, a toothpaste tube of returning college freshmen and regional sales associates. It’s a mercifully brief flight: ten minutes taxiing, ten minutes climbing over a bread-knife set of mountains, ten more over a grooved desert, another ten over patchwork farmland, then a curtain of clouds parts and they bank over a stubby, pine-ringed city. At three thousand feet, the pilot sleepily and prematurely welcomes them to Spokane, Washington, ground temperature fifty-four.
Wheels on the ground, Claire notes that six of her eight cell-phone calls and text messages are from Daryl, who has now gone thirty-six hours without talking to his girlfriend and finally suspects something is amiss. The first text reads R U mad. The second, Is it the strippers. Claire puts her phone away without reading the rest.
They straggle from the Jetway through a tidy, bright airport that looks like a clean bus station, past electronic ads for Indian casinos, photos of streams and old brick buildings, and signs welcoming them to something called “the Inland Northwest.” They make a strange group: old Pasquale in a dark suit and hat, with a cane, like he’s slipped from a black-and-white movie; Michael Deane looking like a different time-travel experiment, a shuffling, baby-faced grandpa; Shane, now worried that he’s overplayed his hand, constantly riffling his hair, muttering apropos of nothing: “I’ve got other ideas, too.” Only Claire has weathered the journey well, and this reminds Shane of William Eddy’s Forlorn Hope: it was those women, too, who made the passage with some of their strength intact.
Outside, the afternoon sky is chalky, air crackling. No sign of the city they flew over, just trees and basalt stumps surrounding airport parking garages.
Michael’s man Emmett has a private investigator waiting for them, a thin balding man in his fifties leaning on a dirty Ford Expedition. He’s wearing a heavy coat over a suit jacket and holding a sign that doesn’t inspire much confidence: MICHAEL DUNN.